August 10, 2009
Portals
When I enlisted in the Navy, boot camp for women was located at Bainbridge, Maryland. As new recruits, character building was an important and ever present element of our training. An impressive sign positioned over the entrance to the drill hall read, “Through These Portals Pass the Women of the Greatest Navy on Earth”. Every time we marched through those doors we were reminded of who we were. As believers it might be good to have a reminder over the doors of our churches that read, “Through These Portals Pass the Greatest Sinners on Earth”.
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Gail;
-----Such a sign would be a well placed double entendre. We take Jesus at His word when He said, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mat 5:48). We must and will be perfect before we can step into our eternal life in His Kingdom. But the perfection we must be before then we can not be ourselves. As a people who live towards the goal of perfection, knowing the consequences of failing it and the reward for achieving it, do we really struggle to the very last of our efforts for it? If each of us had to spend a week in Hell and a week in Heaven, we would then, after those two weeks, work scrupulously on our righteousness to its last detail. Although that is not a possibility, we could each spend a week imagining the one, then the other. But we don’t. No, we are more than neck deep in the difficulties of trying to maintain our lives in this difficult world, so much so that our righteousness does not get practiced as much as it could. And that failure existing in the face of the perfection we purport to be the escape from the misery we fear makes us sinners in the greatest. Yet, fortunately for whosoever will, receiving that perfection and escaping the misery is by His mercy and grace as much as it is certain. The righteousness we must now be is not our own. It is imputed to us just for our desiring to be it. In that blessing we are great, yet sinners still.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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